Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Eight US navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group have attempted suicide since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, Hung Cao, the acting US navy secretary, revealed in a letter to the US senator Kirsten Gillibrand obtained by the Guardian.
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A US district judge heard arguments in the showdown between Donald Trump and CNN, MS Now and Politico, suggesting in comments that he was more inclined to side with the media plaintiffs who sued the president on Monday.
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Trump welcomed Xi Jinping to the US, taking the unusual step of greeting the Chinese leader on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews to kick off his state visit.
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There was one discordant note in the carefully orchestrated arrival ceremony, when Trump visibly winced at the sound of a US military jet flying overhead as he stood alongside Xi on the red carpet, listening to the US national anthem. Video of the moment showed that while Trump recoiled from the sound of the flyover, Xi remained impassive, as did the wives of both men.
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Democrats in Maine accused Republican senator Susan Collins of corruption after ProPublica reported that the FBI had proposed investigating her for allegedly accepting bribes – before Trump derailed the inquiry.
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The United States has invited Vladimir Putin to take part in the meeting of the G20 scheduled in Miami in December in what would be the first major summit with the Russian leader present since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
White House appears to admit JD Vance was source quoted by Politico in article used to justify Trump's ban
The White House appeared to confirm on Wednesday night that what it called sensitive national security information on the Iran war published by Politico, which it pointed to this week as justification for Donald Trump banning the news outlet, was provided to the publication by vice-president JD Vance.
The White House statement was released in response to reporting on Wednesday from the media outlet Status, which identified Vance as the anonymous “senior administration official” quoted by Politico in a 12 June 2026 article on the progress of US talks with Iran.
“Indeed, Vance not only briefed POLITICO on the state of the Iran deal talks, but spoke to a group of reporters from several news organizations”, Status reported. “In exchange for the information, those outlets agreed to grant Vance anonymity.”
A social media post from the White House then seemed to acknowledge Vance was the source for what the White House had called, in a letter to Politico on Tuesday, an article with “sensitive security information, and misinformation about national security information” so reckless that it justified the news outlet being banned from covering Trump in person.
“For more context, the White House holds regular press briefings to ensure accurate information is provided — but even then the media lies and peddles misinformation,” the White House statement responding to the Status report said. “That article was included to highlight the White House going to great lengths to provide important access, only to have it distorted and manipulated by the propagandists in the media.”
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A US district judge on Wednesday heard arguments in the extraordinary showdown between Donald Trump and CNN, MS Now and Politico, suggesting in comments that he was more inclined to side with the media plaintiffs who sued the president on Monday.
Lawyers representing the media organizations have asked Timothy J Kelly, a district judge, to force the White House to return the press badges that were taken over the weekend after Trump banned their journalists from the building. While the judge declined to rule on Wednesday, he acknowledged that due process had not been followed in revoking access.
The three news organizations were not given advance notice that they were in violation of any set of standards and only received formal notice – in letters sent to each news organization on Tuesday – that they “exhibited behavior in violation of the standards of professionalism and decorum expected of those given access to the White House Complex, including by trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information”.
When he originally announced the ban in a Friday post on Truth Social, Trump cited “their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”, rather than any violation of national security protocols.
During a tele-hearing on Wednesday afternoon, Kelly cited past case law that clearly laid out the need for a distinct process that involved advance notice of an infraction and the opportunity to plead one’s case.
“I think it is fair to say that the processes that the circuit laid out in those two cases wasn’t followed here,” the judge said, referring to two similar cases involving journalists who had either lost access or were denied access to the White House. The judge said that the cases made clear that “before a journalist’s White House hard pass was suspended or revoked, that the journalist was entitled to pre-deprivation notice and an opportunity to be heard”.
Congressman Ro Khanna, the progressive Democrat whose California district sits across a swath of Silicon Valley, has called for an agreement between the US and China to pace and monitor AI development as he led a “shadow hearing” on Thursday of Democrats on the House select committee on “the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party”.
“The American people are deeply concerned about the future of AI and the potential risks,” Khanna said in a statement. “We urgently need an agreement with China on basic inspections and safety standards.”
The virtual hearing included testimony from Geoffrey Hinton, British-Canadian computer scientist and Nobel laureate often called “the godfather” of artificial intelligence, on what kind of US-China agreement might be possible. Khanna said OpenAI and Anthropic had not agreed to testify.
The progressive Democrat also said he’d sent letters to leading Chinese AI companies, including Moonshot AI, Alibaba, and DeepSeek requesting commitments to join American AI labs in a binding international agreement to responsibly pace the development of the technology.
On Tuesday, members of the committee sent a letter to the White House saying that US calls to “pace the frontier” of AI “do not need to conflict with ensuring American AI leadership and maintaining our strategic edge against the PRC, which is also an imperative.”
The signatories called on Donald Trump to use his summit with Xi in Washington tjis week to press for “a binding, enforceable, and verifiable international accord to prevent any country from losing control of AI or unleashing misaligned superintelligence on the world.”
The letter acknowledged that when engaging with China on the issue, “the US cannot assume commitments will be upheld unless there are clear mechanisms for verifying compliance. We recognize that this is a complicated topic and there are no easy solutions.”
The letter also requests that Trump meet with committee members after his sit-down with China’s leader. “Just as humans must be kept in the loop of this technology, Congress must be kept in the loop of your diplomacy,” it says.
In remarks earlier this week at the Asia Society, Khanna addressed the issue of US-China AI competition, days after Trump proposed an “AI Force” and an AI czar as the issue of data centers have become a potent midterm issue.
Kahnna was asked how managing competition between the two AI superpowers would be possible if the stated goal of the US is to win the AI race, leaving China with little incentive for China to co-operate.
“Winning the AI war is like winning a nuclear war – it would just lead to devastation,” Khanna said. “I don’t think the US should be trying to win an AI war – I think we need to come to an agreement about basic safety and basic standards to prevent a loss of control and misuse.”
The US, he added, could continue to have the best chips and researchers. “It’s like nuclear weapons,” he said. “Both sides want to have the most advanced weapons, but there are still arms control agreements.”
The call for US-China co-operation comes after the congressman published a bill of rights proposal for managing data centers in the US.
At the the meeting in New York, he told the Guardian that levies on data centers he proposes would not affect US competitiveness.
“The data issue is about economic balancing at home. There are a lot of places in the US you can build data centers that are away from residential communities, but big tech has just been lazy in building them where its easy but they need to build them only where communities want them and where there is real community benefit.”
“I believe we need to tax agentic AI and robots,” he added. “There should be a tax to have neutrality in our tax code so that we are not incentivizing the replacement of human beings.” Workers, he added should also benefit from increased productivity as a result of AI.
“There has to be a value to social cohesion in this country,” he added. “We need to be on the side of workers more than tech billionaires in terms of how this AI revolution takes place.”
Khanna said that in keeping with regulations and safeguards in place for the nuclear power industry, the AI industry should embrace oversight and monitoring. “If something negative should happen the call would be for total nationalization,” he warned. “It’s a reasonable proposal that the private sector should get behind.”
A bill of rights around AI should include investment in communities around data centers because most of what was currently proposed in the US amounts to “data center extraction”.
“There should be a fund of $10m per 100 megawatts of data processing power to invest in schools, parks, jobs programs and infrastructure” and that “could easily be paid by the companies setting these data centers up.”
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Trump mocked for wincing during loud flyover, as Xi, and the wives of both leaders, remained impassive
Commentators and news outlets on the left and the right of the US political spectrum mocked Donald Trump on Wednesday for visibly wincing during a loud flyover of US military jets he staged for his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
Video of the US president recoiling as the jets flew overhead, as Xi, his wife, Peng Liyuan, and Melania Trump all remained calm, was captured in a live broadcast on Britain’s Sky News.
The leftwing streamer Hasan Piker, who featured the Sky News broadcast on his live Twitch stream, exclaimed “What the fuck was that face! Xi didn’t even flinch!” After replaying the moment, Piker added: “Oh my god! Fucking mogged! Trump, it’s your air show! How do you get scared at your air show?”
The moment, from a different angle, was captured on a White House live stream, and then posted online with mocking captions by both the rightwing New York Post and the leftwing MeidasTouch.
Lindell TV, the partisan rightwing news outlet published by Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter and 2020 election conspiracy theorist, which was chosen by the White House to provide pool video, zoomed out at exactly the moment Trump winced, so did not capture the president’s startled reaction in its video.
As mockery of Trump spread across social media, the White House shared edited video of the arrival ceremony that did not include the flyover.
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The United States has invited Vladimir Putin to take part in the meeting of the G20 scheduled in Miami in December in what would be the first major summit with the Russian leader present since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The invitation, which marks a significant reversal by the Trump administration of Russia’s international isolation, was announced by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations conference in New York.
“We’ve invited President Putin to the G20,” Rubio said in a televised press conference following a meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. “We think it’s an opportunity for him to engage not just with [Trump] but with other world leaders. We hope that’s an invitation he’ll accept.”
The Kremlin has not yet responded publicly to the invitation, which is likely to raise concerns from Ukraine and other European leaders who have recently accused Russia of launching hybrid attacks to disrupt logistics and spread political uncertainty among Kyiv’s allies.
Russia remains a member of the G20 but Putin has not attended a summit of the body since 2019. He did attend one session virtually in 2023. The December summit is set to take place at the Trump National Doral golf club.
Trump greets Xi at start of Chinese leader's state visit to US
Donald Trump just greeted China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
The US president rolled out the red carpet for his Chinese counterpart, and a ceremony is ongoing – in which a very loud flyover of jets just punctuated the US national anthem.
Reuters provided live video of the ceremony, in the absence of the US pool cameras, which are boycotting the event in solidarity with three news organizations banned by Trump on Friday over what he sees as overly critical coverage of his performance as president.
According to an update from the pool’s print reporter at the base:
Staff from Fox, CBS and NBC are here but not shooting, as journalists wait to see whether the judge will issue a ruling after hearing arguments today. Some of the networks appear to be breaking down their cameras.
There are signs in front of other tripods/cameras that say: NewsNation, Newsmax, RSBN, One America News and Lindell.
Trump and his wife, Melania, have just ushered Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, into limousines to leave the airport, and boarded a helicopter to return to the White House.
According to the White House, the arrival ceremony also featured:
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a 100-foot-long red carpet
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a salute battery
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a 21-Person honor cordon
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two three-person color teams to include the
US and Chinese flags -
a US air force band playing fanfare and the U.S. and Chinese national anthems
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platoons from each US military service
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two B-1 bomber flyovers
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two American flower presenters
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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand confirms 'eight suicide attempts' by US Navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, has confirmed to the Guardian an earlier report from CNN, that the acting US Navy secretary, Hung Cao, told her in a letter on Tuesday, that there have been “eight suicide attempts” by US Navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran.
Gillibrand also provided a copy of Cao’s written responses to her questions to the Guardian.
The revelation about the attempted suicides came in response to the fifth of the senator’s 12 questions. Here is the full text of the exchange:
5. Have there been any suicides aboard the ship during this deployment? How many instances of detected suicidal ideation or attempted self-harm, including attempts to go overboard, has the Department recorded?
There have been no suicides onboard during this deployment. Since the beginning of LINCOLN’s deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group - this number includes the LINCOLN crew and Sailors from the carrier air wing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers, and all embarked aviation squadrons.
In a statement to the Guardian, Gillibrand said: “What Trump and Secretary Hegseth dismissed as ‘fake news’ turned out to be serious and deteriorating conditions for our service members. Our troops and their families make immense sacrifices every single day, yet the president dismissed them with open disrespect. That this administration can find endless taxpayer dollars for bombs, ballrooms, and billionaires, but cannot take care of our service members, is completely unacceptable.”
Here is the complete text of Cao’s response to Gillibrand’s questions:
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Lawyer for media outlets banned by Trump tells court he thought White House letters citing national security grounds were fake
Ted Boutrous, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who represented CNN, Politico and MS NOW in court on Wednesday, reportedly told the judge that, when he first saw three unsigned letters sent to the news organizations on Tuesday, four days after they were banned from the White House by Donald Trump, which attempted to justify the bans on national security grounds, he “didn’t think they were real”, the legal journalist Adam Klasfeld reports.
Boutrous pointed out that the three letters – to CNN, Politico and MS NOW – were unsigned and not on White House letterhead. All three cited articles published by the outlets months ago, most of them written by reporters who do not have passes to the White House.
The letters, Boutrous said, looked a “post hoc” attempt to justify the bans that the president himself told reporters on Friday were in response to overly negative coverage of his performance as president, by grafting on national security grounds.
In a supplemental declaration filed with the court Sudeep Reddy, MS NOW’s Washington bureau chief, pointed out that only one of the three articles cited in the White House press office letter, a report published on 11 June 2026 by Jake Traylor, “was written by a journalist who held a White House hard pass.”
Reddy also noted that the broadcaster submitted a request for the renewal of Traylor’s hard pass on 18 June 2026, a week later, “and his hard pass was subsequently renewed.”
Acting US navy secretary says 8 personnel assigned to USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group attempted suicide - report
There have been “eight suicide attempts” by US Navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, the acting US Navy secretary, Hung Cao, revealed in a letter to senator Kirsten Gillibrand obtained by CNN.
“Since the beginning of Lincoln’s deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group,” Cao wrote to Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who is a member of the Senate armed services committee, the broadcaster reports.
“This number includes the Lincoln crew and sailors from the carrier airwing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers and all embarked aviation squadrons”, Cao reportedly wrote in a letter this week responding to written oversight questions from the senator.
The Guardian has asked the US Navy for comment on the report.
RFK Jr. accepted millions in book advances, gifts from MAHA allies: report
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services and a figurehead of the Make America Healthy Again movement, has taken millions of dollars in book advances and gifts from personal allies active in that movement outside of the government, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Kennedy received $4 million in book advances for a pair of books forthcoming from a company belonging to one of his friends and business partners, Tony Lyons, who runs several MAHA-related organizations.
Mr. Lyons also helms a nonprofit that paid $210,000 in consulting fees to Mr. Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines.
And Gavin de Becker, a friend of Kennedy’s who donated to his presidential campaign, provided him with $126,000 worth of lodging in a Washington, D.C. residence de Becker owned.
Ethics experts who spoke to the Times warned the payments may violated rules preventing government officials like Kennedy from leveraging their offices for profit.
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Federal court hearing on Trump's 'ban on the free press' concludes
A federal court in Washington just finished hearing arguments in the lawsuit over Donald Trump’s self-described “ban on the free press,” in which he barred three news organizations – CNN, MS Now and Politico – from the White House over what he considers overly negative coverage of his work as a president.
C-SPAN posted an audio stream of most of the court hearing on YouTube, which has now, sadly, been removed, but before it was, the judge overseeing the case promised to issue a ruling soon on the request from the media organizations to have the credentials of the outlets restored while the court case goes on.
Judge Timothy Kelly, a former federal prosecutor nominated to the US district court for the District of Columbia in 2017 by Trump, is hearing the arguments from the government and the news organizations. In 2018, Kelly ordered the White House to restore the press pass of a CNN reporter, Jim Acosta, after he challenged Trump at a news conference and was briefly banned.
CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, reports that Kelly “began the hearing Wednesday by telling attorneys that the White House did not give reporters appropriate due process before revoking their access to the building, running against previous court decisions.”
Kelly himself previously held that the White House cannot suspend or revoke a journalist’s access without notice or giving them a chance to appeal that decision on due process grounds.
That process “wasn’t played out here,” Kelly said. “I just say to both sides that’s where I am,” Kelly said. “Before we get to any core First Amendment issues, there is a due process claim and a due process issue that seems to me the first stop in figuring out how to resolve the motion.”
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Here's where things stand at midday:
Trump is set to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in a major diplomatic summit. Xi, the long-serving leader of the Chinese Communist Party, will land at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland for a three-day visit. Trump plans to receive him with a red carpet and a personal greeting on the tarmac — a warmed welcome than Trump has ever given the Chinese leader.
The Trump administration’s White House ban on three news outlets will go to court today. The Trump administration will have to defend the president’s ban on CNN, Politico and MS Now from the White House before a Trump-appointed federal judge. Trump himself has said he isn’t optimistic about the outcome.
The Iranian president addressed the United Nations, a day after Trump’s apocalyptic threats. A day after Trump threatened to “annihilate” his country and drive its people “into Hell,” Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a forceful rebuttal to the gathered world leaders. He accused the US of engaging in terrorism, and vowed Iran would “never bow” to American threats.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his address to the UN, pushed for global pressure on Russia. He sought greater economic pressure on Russia to end its years-long invasion of Ukraine, and warned that continued attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure would be met with similar strikes in Russia. That might worry the Trump administration, which is trying to bring down gasoline and diesel prices before the midterms.
Susan Collins’ alleged pay-for-play scheme is providing fuel to Maine Democrats. The alleged corruption, detailed in a ProPublica investigation published yesterday, is providing campaign fodder for the state’s Democrats, including Collins’ challenger for a key Senate seat.
Zelenskyy, speaking to the United Nations, tries to rally support for a grinding war
Speaking to the United Nations annual assembly of world leaders for the fifth time since the invasion of his country, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought to rally global support for the defense of Ukraine from Russia.
Zelenskyy warned that Putin would not be appeased by a partial victory in Ukraine, and would continue pursuing conquest in Ukraine even if granted a piece of its territory.
He also asked world leaders to help end the conflict by pressuring Russia financially, stepping up sanctions to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek peace.
“When someone gives Russia more money through trade, they give this war more time. And that is exactly why we insist on limiting trade with the aggressor, and why we are burning Russia’s revenues ourselves,” he says.
In one particularly relevant comment for the Trump administration, Zelenskyy warned that continued Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system would result in retaliation in kind. “Ukrainians understand that this winter could be very hard for us,” he said. “But in response we will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia too”
The day before, Zelenskyy met with President Trump, who was quick to point out while speaking to reporters that Ukraine’s latest efforts to take out Russian oil infrastructure had impacted global fuel prices. Those prices (which have been worsened by Trump’s military campaign against Iran) have become a burden for Republicans ahead of the midterms.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 threw Europe, and the international order, into crisis when it began more than four years ago. What was predicted to be a swift conquest has devolved into a grinding war of attrition reminiscent of World War I.
It has also since become just one unfolding crisis in a world increasingly at war. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel has sparked a devastating Israeli retaliation against Gaza and renewed war between Israel and Lebanon; the US-Israel joint strikes on Iran, downstream of the Gaza war, have turned into a protracted conflict that has set the Persian Gulf ablaze; and a tenuous transition to democracy in Sudan has spiraled into a vicious civil war, each side backed by foreign allies.
Zelenskyy used his appearance at the UN General Assembly to remind delegates of the scale of devastation facing Ukraine, as just today Russia launched a punishing round of bombing on its capital, Kyiv.
“Russia has used over 2100 missiles against us. More than 950 of them were ballistic missiles,” Zelenskyy said, adding: “They launch jet-powered Shahed [missiles] every hour… We are fighting them 24/7”.
He said this is “to make life harder for the economy and to disrupt our lives. They disrupt children at school. Would your country survive something like this?”
Bernie Sanders introduces bill to “ban artificial superintelligence”
Bernie Sanders, the left-wing independent Senator from Vermont who has quickly become one of the loudest AI-skeptical voices in US politics, announced on Wednesday new legislation that would, in his words, “ban artificial superintelligence.”
“The leading experts are clear: AI is rapidly escaping our control,” Sanders wrote in a post to social media announcing the bill. “Congress must act NOW. Today I’m introducing legislation to permanently ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI until clear safety rules are in place.”
The Associated Press reported earlier this morning that the legislation – backed in the House of Representatives by Texas Democrat Greg Cesar – would pause the development of frontier AI until a new “Department of Artificial Intelligence” could establish guardrails around the industry.
It would also ban, in perpetuity, “artificial superintelligence,” a category that includes AI systems that exceed the limits of human intelligence or have “sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the destruction or disempowerment of humanity,” per AP.
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Maine Democrats seize on pay-for-play donation allegations against Collins
The allegations, first reported in a ProPublica story yesterday, were the latest development in an already chaotic Maine Senate race: that Maine GOP senator Susan Collins’ campaign had accepted large donations from a defense contractor in return for Collins steering government funds to the company.
A day later, Maine Democrats are centering those allegations as they seek to win Collins’ seat in the November midterm elections.
“I cannot stress enough today the seriousness of these allegations,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, said at a party press conference called to highlight the investigation.
Collins, Murphy-Anderson said, had “sold us out yet again, and gotten bailed out of trouble by the President of the United States. It is not the first time she has betrayed us. However, this November we have the opportunity to ensure it is one of the last.”
Collins’s team has fiercly denied the allegations, which emerged from an FBI investigation into Martin Kao, former executive of the defense contractor Navakek. Kao, who detailed the alleged scheme to the FBI, has since been convicted and sentenced to prison on unrelated charges.
ProPublica reports that the FBI has been investigating Collins as part of a wide-ranging probe into members of Congress, but that the inquiry died as part of the Trump administration’s restructuring of the FBI.
Troy Jackson, Collins’ opponent for her Maine Senate seat in November, has also seized on the corruption allegations, implying that Collins has been deferential to Trump because his FBI helped kill the probe into her conduct. (Jackson was chosen by the Maine Democrats to replace their previous nominee, one-time progressive darling Graham Platner, after allegations of sexual assault led him to terminate his campaign.)
“This is corruption of the highest order,” Jackson wrote in a post to social media. “Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign, and then Donald Trump helped her cover it up.”
“The jig is up,” he added in another post today.
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Trump administration drafting up plans for 90-day embargo on diesel exports: report
The Trump administration is readying to launch a 90-day ban on diesel fuel exports from the United States, following mounting calls from his party to take action to bring down the fuel’s price ahead of the midterm elections, POLITICO reported Wednesday.
Several people with inside knowledge of the conversations told POLITICO (currently one of three outlets banned from the White House by Trump) that the plan has created a schism within pro- and anti-embargo camps in the administration. It’s also prompted furor from the oil and gas industry that has broadly supported the president.
One oil industry executive privy to the conversations told the outlet that Trump seemed intent on announcing a ban by the end of the week.
The price of fuel has weighed heavily on Republicans in the lead-up to the midterms, which will determine whether Trump’s party retains control of Congress for the second half of his term. Trump ran in 2024 in part on bringing down the price of gas, but the war he helped kick off between the US and Iran, and the closure of vital oil shipping arteries it prompted, has sent the cost of fuel skyrocketing.
Diesel, in particular, has become a sore spot. The fuel for everything from semi-trucks to tractors to heavy machinery, it has surged in price even more than standard gasoline, to more than $6.50 per gallon.
That’s prompted some Republicans, especially those representing farming-heavy states, to publicly call on the president to take drastic action to lower the price of diesel.
The pushback, POLITICO reports, is coming from oil and gas executives and administration officials who warn that the embargo could raise fuel prices in the long run.
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Yesterday, Britain’s new prime minister Andy Burnham navigated his way through a first high-stakes meeting with Donald Trump at the UN general assembly in New York. His aides were delighted with how the meeting went, as Trump praised the US-UK relationship and described Burnham as a “natural businessman”.
The anticipated sticking points – the Chagos Islands, West Bank settlement sanctions and Ireland – appear not to have derailed the talks nor cast a shadow over the future relationship.
In today’s edition of The Latest podcast, Lucy Hough speaks to the our policy editor in London, Kiran Stacey. You can also watch on YouTube.
'I am the code': Trump reportedly clashed with White House ballroom architect after dismissing safety concerns
The Washington Post (paywall) reports today that James McCrery II, the first architect on Donald Trump’s controversial $400m White House ballroom project, resigned after repeatedly clashing with the president, who dismissed his warnings that design features Trump was insisting on violated building safety codes.
McCrery withdrew from the project last October after warning Trump that a preliminary design he wanted “did not provide adequate emergency exit routes or fire-containment measures”, according to the Post’s report, which cites two people with knowledge of the discussions and corroborating documents reviewed by the paper.
The sources said Trump brushed off the architect’s concerns, and argued that no building codes apply to White House construction. “I am the code,” Trump reportedly said.
The Post previously reported that they had also clashed over the size of the ballroom. One document obtained by the paper features an image of a planned data center overlaid on a map of Manhattan, with a note that appears to be poking fun at McCrery’s concerns. “James,” it reads. “And you think we are big.”
Another note made in Sharpie makes clear Trump’s preference for Corinthian-style columns.
When approached by the Post, McCrery didn’t say why he stepped down. A White House official said it was “factually false and totally inaccurate” to suggest he left the project over issues with the code, and said he was a “valued member of the initial design team.”
Discussions about the safety issues continued for months after McCrery’s departure, according to White House records reviewed by the Post.
It is not clear from those records whether the safety issues he identified have been resolved in more recent designs by Shalom Baranes Associates, the architecture firm that took over McCrery’s firm’s role in the project late last year.
The ballroom project is – unusually – being overseen by the Executive Residence, rather than the General Services Administration or National Park Service. The small office is exempt from rules that require federal agencies to solicit competitive bids and disclose details to the public, the Post previously reported. Typically, it’s responsible for routine repairs, entertainment expenses, and the purchase of furniture, art and other items for the executive mansion.
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Rubio, in his press conference, also touched on the war in Iran at several points, including on the surprise negotiations that took place yesterday between Trump administration envoys and the Iran delegation.
“I don’t want to mischaracterize this as a major breakthrough,” Rubio said. “But at the same time I think it was significant that at least there was a conversation.”
Little detail has been shared about what was discussed at that meetings, though Rubio framed the conversation as a continuation of the earlier back-and-forth between the two sides.
Rubio also notably insisted that Trump would be able to see through his campaign in Iran acting on his authority alone, even if Republicans lose control of Congress in November and if Democrats were to oppose the continuation of US operations against the country.
Rubio also briefly addressed Trump’s meeting with Delcy Rodriguez, the interim Venezuelan president, who last night posed for a friendly photo with Trump at a Manhattan hotel only miles from where her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, was incarcerated.
“It was a short meeting, but it was a very important meeting,” Rubio said.
Rodriguez took the reins in Venezuela after the US raided her country’s capital of Caracas and seized Maduro, the toppled autocrat, in the dead of night. Since then, she’s been pliant to US interests and brokered a deal that would see a vast share of her country’s oil wealth into US coffers.
During remarks to reporters, Rubio said that the US was working to “create the groundwork and rebuild the institutions necessary to have free and fair elections in Venezuela.”
But he caveated that free and fair elections would have to wait until Venezuela was in the shape to support an “enduring Republic,” and that its first elected leader could not inherit “a complete catastrophe, economic and social.”
The conditions for such a democratic transition, per Rubio, include rebuilding Venezuela’s independent media, creating the infrastructure for a trustworthy electoral process, and bringing back opposition political parties exiled abroad. Here Rubio name dropped María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who had maintained close tied with Trump before the administration ultimately backed Rodriguez.
Speaking to reporters at the UN, Rubio alludes to regime change in Cuba
Addressing reporters at the United Nations, Marco Rubio reiterated, in so many words, that the Trump administration is seeking to replace the current Cuban leadership, and did not rule out the use of force to achieve that goal.
“The Cuban Revolution has failed. It has failed for sixty-something years, it’s a failure now,” Rubio said. “The question is what replaces it.”
He continued: “We’re open to measures moving forward that begin that process of change.”
Pressed on whether the Trump administration would try to repeat its tactics in Venezuela – where it raided the country in the dead of night, arrested former autocrat Nicolas Maduro, and ushered in a more US-friendly leader to replace him – Rubio equivocated, but did not rule out the possibility.
“If there is a threat to the national security of the United States, the president has both the power and the obligation to address it,” Rubio said. “That said, our preference always is to deal with these things – I don’t want to call it diplomatic – but in a negotiating way.”
He also said he believed that American business could play “a positive role in a future Cuba,” and that any new government would have to be friendlier to business interests. That comes in light of reporting by the Guardian that shows businesses close to the administration have been buying up assets in Cuba in light of chaos wrought by the US’s latest efforts to cripple the island’s economy.
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Iranian President to United Nations: "We will never bow our head"
In a speech to the United Nations following on the heels of President Trump’s threats to “annihilate” his country, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, struck a defiant tone.
“He must know that the resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions, increased pressure, increased bullying,” Pezeshkian said, referring to Trump. “We will never bow our head or bend at the knee.”
He continued: “It must be understood by Mr Trump and those who seek to bully us that we are ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations - without accepting the language of force.”
Trump, in his speech the day earlier, said Iran faced a choice between “greatness” and annihilation, warning Iran that he would its people “into hell” if they didn’t make a deal. It was latest of several apocalyptic-sounding threats from Trump toward Iran since the beginning of the conflict.
Earler in his address, during which the US delegation walked out of the room, Masoud also decried the US and Israel’s campaign against his country as “terrorism.”
“The US president described us as terrorists. We have been the victims of terrorism,” he said.
He said that while Iran has avoided attacking civilian populations, the US “bombed a school” and “children perished under bombs with weapons used by the US and Israel.”
“They impose the war on us but we have proven that we’re not afraid of fighting, of war, that is defensive in nature, and we will stand in defence of our beloved Iran, our homeland, until our last breath.”
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Melania Trump told Fox & Friends this morning that she will be releasing a two-part docuseries following her life as First Lady.
“There’s some private questions that I will answer that people never heard before,” Melania Trump told the show’s hosts.
It hasn’t yet been a year since a previous documentary about Melania Trump, titled “Melania,” was released.
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Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran to UN general assembly is stunning, even for him - analysis
Donald Trump has a habit of discomfiting delegates to the United Nations general assembly. But this year, he may have upstaged the ghost of Nikita Khrushchev by openly contemplating the annihilation of a fellow UN member state.
Eleven minutes into a 40-minute address, the US president announced he had “a big decision to make” over Iran, which has staged a much more determined resistance than Trump anticipated when he decided to go to war against the country in February.
“Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild, and create a far greater country than it ever was before?” he asked. “Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Possibly not since Khrushchev, the late Soviet leader, brandished his shoe and allegedly banged it on a desk in 1960 in protest at a fellow delegate’s speech has the annual gathering witnessed such a display of bellicosity from a superpower leader.
But this seemed more shocking.
The world may have become inured to Trump’s dire threats to send Iran “to the stone age” or end its civilization – so often have they been issued, only to sometimes be followed by a ceasefire or negotiations. But hearing them voiced in a forum created in the aftermath of the second world war, with the explicit aim of preventing future conflicts, was disconcerting.
Iran was the focal point of much of Trump’s speech, which began with a catalogue of familiar boasts of his supposed achievements that seemed better fitted to a domestic audience.
Whether or not the latest threat should be taken literally, little of what he said about Iran seemed reassuring. He appeared to play fast and loose with the facts, consciously or otherwise.
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Trump administration set to defend its White House press ban in court
Trump administration lawyers will face the three new outlets banned from the White House by the president – Politico, CNN, and MS Now – in court today, as the organizations ask a federal judge to restore their access.
Trump banned the three outlets late last week via a post to Truth Social, sparking a scuffle with the Washington press. The three banned outlets swiftly sued, and other news organizations have halted some coverage of the president in solidarity, including the other rotating members of the president’s standard TV pool (which take turns filming the president’s press-open events and distributing the footage to others).
The three barred news organizations have accused the president of violating their First Amendment rights by retaliating against them over coverage he disliked. The Trump administration, in a new filing, countered by saying that White House access is a “privilege,” not a right, and that the three outlets’ reporting of information the administration deems sensitive constitutes a national security threat.
Trump himself has said he’ll “probably lose” the lawsuit, which has landed in the courtroom of a judge he appointed.
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Iran and Ukraine leaders set to address UN after Trump's departure
Trump won’t be back at the United Nations today, but world leaders speaking after him on day two of the General Assembly’s gathering will be reckoning with the international order he’s shaped.
In particular, the leaders of both Iran, the nation Trump started a war with, and Ukraine, whose war with Russia Trump staked his 2024 campaign on ending, will feature in Wednesday’s lineup of speakers.
The President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, is slated to speak first, a day after Trump used his address to the body to threaten to “annihilate” his country and drive its people “into Hell” if Iranian leadership refused to strike a deal to end the war.
Around the same time Trump delivered those remarks, members of Trump’s team, including Middle East envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, held a snap meeting with the Iranian delegation, Trump later said. The President reported that the meeting went “very well,” though Iran has since pushed back on claims that it dropped some preconditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz during those talks.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, will also take the podium, a day after he also met with President Trump. His address will follow a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine. Both will give Zelenskyy a platform to rally international support for the defense of his country from a Russian invasion that has endured for well over 4 years.
In remarks to reporters before his meeting with Trump, Zelenskyy said he wanted to see the war ended before winter.
“I hope we will end this war, and President Trump will help us end this war. We need to do it as quickly as possible, before winter,” he said.
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Trump administration calls banned journalists' White House access 'a privilege, not a right,' brands coverage a security risk
In a new legal filing in the case over a trio of new outlets barred entry to the White House, Trump administration lawyers repeatedly defended the president’s ban by saying journalists were not entitled to access to the building.
“Access to the White House is a privilege, not a right,” the filing stated.
The filing went on to assert that the three outlets – by publishing sensitive or classified information obtained through its reporting – constituted a national security threat, giving the president the right to ax their credentials.
Trump banned the three outlets – CNN, MS Now, and Politico – last Friday in a snap decision announced via social media. He branded the three outlets “fake news” and threatened future bans against other outlets could follow.
Early the following week, the three publications filed a joint lawsuit asking a federal judge to restore their access, alleging that the action was an illegal act of retaliation that violated their First Amendment rights. A president, they argued in their complaint, can’t bar access to journalists based on reporting he doesn’t like.
Since then, Trump has found himself in an escalating tit-for-tat with the press, which has responded to the ban with measures of solidarity. Several outlets have declined to publish any images or video of the president so long as the three outlets are denied access to the White House. And the members of Trump’s standard TV pool – five channels, including CNN, who take turns traveling with the president, filming his daily activities, and distributing that footage – have ceased their duties.
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The Trump administration is refusing to work with the newly appointed deputy head of the United Nations refugee agency, Reuters reported.
Tressa Rae Finerty, an American who took up the role of deputy high commissioner at UNHCR earlier this month, has taken leave as she seeks a waiver from the US government that would allow her to carry out aspects of her duties, according to seven diplomatic sources.
Her treatment by Washington, which previously considered cutting ties with the agency, is seen by several of the diplomats as a retaliatory response after UNHCR opted against Washington’s preferred candidate, Simon Hankinson.
A State Department spokesperson said it could not comment on pending legal issues. “We work with and through UNHCR when doing so advances US foreign policy interests,” the spokesperson said.
Trump to meet with China's Xi as Congress mulls bill banning artificial superintelligence
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Donald Trump will meet with the Chinese president Xi Jinping later today, ahead of a three-day visit that will undoubtedly see artificial intelligence (AI) high on the agenda.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has called on the two countries to establish a dialogue on AI similar to the communication between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war.
“Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity, to establish channels for dialogue, transparency, trust and cooperation,” Guterres said.
Tech executives including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jensen Huang of Nvidia will reportedly attend a state dinner at the White House on Thursday evening.
It comes as two leading progressive US lawmakers, senator Bernie Sanders and representative Greg Casar, were due to unveil legislation later today that would ban artificial superintelligence and create a federal agency to oversee advanced AI.
The bill, provided first to the Associated Press, would also pause advanced AI development until guidelines are implemented while creating the Department of Artificial Intelligence. Multiple employees at leading AI companies are endorsing the bill.
“It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘slow it down,’” Sanders said in an interview with AP. “Do we really want to develop a super intelligence that when it becomes smarter than human beings could act independently of human control? I don’t think we do.”
Congress has so far done little to rein in the AI industry even as some of its most prominent leaders warn about potentially catastrophic risks.
Xi departed Beijing on Wednesday, state media said, heading to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, where he will be met by Trump on the tarmac.
“President Xi Jinping left Beijing by special plane for a state visit to the United States” accompanied by his wife Peng Liyuan, his right-hand man Cai Qi, and foreign minister Wang Yi, among others, state broadcaster CCTV said.
In other developments:
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Speaking at the UN general assembly, Donald Trump re-issued his threat to “annihilate” Iran and “drive them into Hell” if the regime didn’t capitulate and make a deal.” He also said he was “working closely with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine” to end the disastrous war, defended his administration’s actions in Latin America – including the midnight raid to arrest former Venezuelan president Nicólas Maduro, defended his drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, accused Mexico of being effectively controlled by the cartels, and said it was “unacceptable” for the US to share a border with a nation under such conditions, pointed to regime change in Cuba and said he would reject any calls for a “globalist scheme” to control artificial intelligence.
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Shortly after his UN address, Trump signed a Greenland deal, which Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederick Nielsen said “underlines the importance of the Nato alliance.” In tricky, carefully worded paragraphs, she said the agreement “recognises the US defining historical and ongoing contributions to the security and defence of Greenland,” but it also “respects the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark, as well as Greenland’s right to self-determination.”
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Trump told a CNN reporter at the UN general assembly on Tuesday that he was “surprised” the outlet was covering him, saying it ‘shouldn’t be here’ after he banned the network alongside Politico and MS Now from the White House on Friday.
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At a joint press conference on Tuesday, vice-president JD Vance and Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced that the federal government was removing 760,000 enrollees from Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces.
